A re-introduction to Supernuclear

Greetings! It’s been over five years since Phil and I started this blog to share the trials and joys of our experiences living near friends.

As we pass 10k subscribers and 200k monthly readers (!), we figured it was time to send a re-introduction of what we’re up to here.

In short: We love living near friends — and we want to help others figure out if it’s right for them. Plenty of people dream about it, but few make the leap. We’re here to give you the motivation and tools to actually do it.

There are societal barriers that make it hard to live with friends (e.g. it’s hard to get a mortgage/loan as anything other than a single person or married couple). But we also see a lot of misconceptions about what it’s like to live communally. We hope that by sharing true stories from the trenches, we can show you that it doesn’t have to be so hard, and that building your life with friends brings benefits that make the work worthwhile.

This blog takes an expansive view of what it means to live communally. It can mean designing and building your dream group home from scratch, like Open Field Coliving in Australia or Radish in Oakland. But you don’t have to live under the same roof or buy property together to live communally: you can choose to simply get to know your neighbors and share resources, like Patty describes in her post on Stoop Coffee. And it doesn’t have to entail long term commitment: you can live in ephemeral communities like Ski Cult in New Mexico or Edge Esmeralda in Healdsburg, CA.

It can mean choosing to live with others who have the same professional goals, like Red Door TV for content creators in Las Vegas, or social ideals like raising kids in community at The Village. It can mean living with 56 other people like Postel in Tel Aviv or simply a couple making their spare bedroom available to community members like the Strahms.

Phil and I, who write and edit this blog, represent two common and very different ‘types’ of ways to live in community:

• Phil and his wife Kristen are the friend compound homebodies: They have set up life in a co-owned property in the Bay Area with 20 friends and 8 kids (including 2 of their own) and also co-own a vacation home with friends. Phil writes about why he wanted to write this blog here.

• I have been more nomadic, dropping into coliving communities around the world like a seasonal community in a French castle and renting a coliving house in NYC. In 2021 I co-bought a set of apartments with friends in Puerto Rico, where I live part time. My motivation for writing the blog is here.

Apparently our way of living is weird enough to merit a whole article in Bon Appetit (I’m the one in black). Photo by Christopher Gregory-Rivera

We share best practices we’ve gleaned from visiting dozens of communal homes: from how to make sure the dishes get done to do’s and don’ts of architecture/design. We go over the 9 types of people you find in coliving, and the crucial question of whether you can date your roommate.

For those who are ready to get down to brass tacks, you’ll find templates of lease documents, co-buying contracts, how to calculate a fair rent to charge your friends, and a mega-guide on how to co-buy. We also keep track of changing laws and regulations around renting/buying property as a group.

We have so much more to share and are grateful you’re reading this! A few asks of you:

1. If you haven’t already (thanks to the 721 of you who have) fill out this intro questionnaire so we can bring you the most useful information.

2. If you have founded or helped manage a communal living situation and would be willing to share a bit more information about your experience (confidentially), please fill out this community survey.

3. We love publishing guest posts, and we pay contributors! Please find guidelines for submission here.

4. If anything we’ve written here resonates with you, we’d love it if you’d share our work so we can reach more people:

A note on paid tiers: All posts are free — we don’t paywall anything. Paid subscriptions are optional and go toward compensating guest contributors. Can’t contribute? No worries. If you can, thank you for supporting this work.